Search This Blog

Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Q&A: Groundwork Labs

DURHAM, N.C. -- On March 9th and 16th Triangle-area accelerator Groundwork Labs will be hosting informational sessions where innovators can learn about this unique two-month program for startups to validate their ideas and reach their next goals. CarolinaTechNews took the launch of the Groundwork 2016 summer session application process to ask the man in charge, John Austin, some questions about this well-known entrepreneurial resource.

Q: When was Groundwork Labs founded and why?

A: Groundwork Labs is a program of NCIDEA, a non-profit foundation that was founded about ten years ago to help startups in North Carolina. It has a grant program for early stage startups, and we award about five grants of up to $50,000 every six months to North Carolina startups.

Giving You An Unfair Advantage

Groundwork was started in early 2012. The main reason for Groundwork was that the NC IDEA grant program had become so popular we were getting 120-150 applicants every six months and only making five awards. We saw some great ideas and smart technologists who had not yet figured out how to turn their idea into a business. We saw the impact that accelerators were having around the country, and thought we could put our non-profit spin on the accelerator model and help startups get to their next stage.

Q: Where is your HQ and how many employees do you have?

A: We are located in the American Underground in Durham. NC IDEA has four employees, 1 ½ of us who are primarily focused on Groundwork Labs. Groundwork has an army of more than 50 volunteers who help the startups who are in our program, while NC IDEA has nearly 100 volunteers who review and help evaluate grant applications.

Q: Who are some recognizable members of your leadership team?

A: Thom Ruhe recently joined the team as NC IDEA's CEO. He has worked at the Kauffman Foundation and Jumpstart in Cleveland. I am the Director of Groundwork Labs.

Q: What are your differentiators from similar organizations?

A: We are a non-profit foundation whose mission is economic development in the state of North Carolina by helping startups.

Q: Who are your customers?

A: Scaleable technology startup companies in or relocating to North Carolina

Q: What problems do you solve?

A: We help companies get from an idea to where they are able to raise equity funding from angels or venture capitalists.Q: What are some new technologies your organization has helped develop?

A: We don't develop technologies, but we have helped interesting startups. A few of the companies that have been through Groundwork Labs include:

Popular Posts

LUND, Sweden -- Earlier this year, Precise Biometrics finalized its acquisition of Potsdam, NY-based NexID Biometrics, a developer of liveness detection software. Startup TechWire reached out to President and CEO Håkan Persson to learn more about how this move impacts his company's lineup of fingerprint software and mobile smart card readers for convenient and secure authentication of people’s identity, and got a glimpse into some issues affecting the biometrics industry in the U.S. and abroad.

Why did Precise Biometrics buy NexID?
By the end of 2020 it is expected that more than 60 percent of all payment transactions will be authenticated by means of biometric authentication, primarily fingerprints. At the same time, fraud is on the rise and expected to continue to grow, prompting payment providers to mitigate fraud through improved security measures.

Through the acquisition of NexID Biometrics, we get access to technology that can identify fake fingers and attempts to spoof a fi…

DURHAM, N.C. -- Businesses across Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill are buzzing – with bees, thanks to Bee Downtown, a unique startup installing and maintaining beehives in urban areas. With a mission to rebuild healthy honey bee populations in cities, Bee Downtown is committed to educating communities about the benefits of bees and how businesses and individuals can collectively help save them.

Leigh-Kathryn Bonner founded the company in 2014 during her junior year at North Carolina State University. A fourth-generation beekeeper from North Carolina, she took her passion for honey bees, agriculture, and entrepreneurship and put it to use in cities to help rebuild healthy honey bee populations.

PALO ALTO, Calif. -- MEDABLE Inc., the leading application and analytics platform for healthcare, today announced Cerebrum, the first cloud-based machine learning solution created specifically for healthcare apps. Cerebrum leverages data gathering smartphones with a first-of-its-kind machine learning engine, resulting in health events becoming more easily predicted, such as warning an elderly relative when he is at greatest risk of a fall, or preventing an asthmatic child from triggering a life threatening episode.